The hostile eyes bored into his. “In what way?”
“I can explain only at my office.” Horace plunged. “If you then insist upon it, I will quit my practice.”
The smile that thinned Latham’s lips could hardly be said to soften the menace of his expression.
“Very well. I’ll humor you so far. Four o’clock.”
At a quarter before that hour a veiled young woman turned into Canandaigua Road and mounted the Harte steps. Dr. Amlie seated her, half facing the door, and made his inspection.
“There is an improvement already,” he pronounced. “Doesn’t it feel easier?”
“It doesn’t itch me so cruel,” said Sarah Dorch.
He busied himself with the dressings. The girl sat rigid, mute and patient. At the end she asked wistfully, “Shall I ever be sightly again, Doctor?”
“You’ll be free of the itching. So much I can promise you.”
“There’s someone coming,” said she, and stretched a hand for her veil.
“Do you mind leaving it off for a moment?” he asked gently.
Genter Latham entered. At first he stared without recognition at the shocking visage.
“Gent—Mr. Latham,” she murmured.
“Sally!” He backed slowly away from her. She sobbed once.
“Tomorrow at the same hour, Sarah,” said Horace.
She rose, swathed her head in the black, obscuring folds, and crept out. Genter Latham’s eyes, slow in a rigid face, followed her until the door closed.
“Is there anything to be done for her?” he asked hoarsely.
“Not very much.”
“Do what you can. Send the bill to me.”
“Very well, Mr. Latham.”
The magnate lingered. He asked in a strained voice, “If Sally had been vaccinated …”
“Well?” prompted Horace.
“… would she have escaped—that?”
“Probably.”
With a painful effort Latham said, “She came to me for the money to take her to Canandaigua for the treatment.”
“And you refused her?”
The man’s face was ghastly. “I didn’t grudge the money. It wasn’t that. I thought the whole thing was damned foolishness.”
“God forgive you!”
“Do everything you can for her.” Still he did not leave. Finally it came out. “Wealthia,” he stammered, “would she have been—like that?”
“Nobody can tell,” answered Horace honestly. “She might have been.”
With a desperate gesture, Genter Latham stumbled to the door and out.
Dr. Amlie wrote gratefully to Dr. Vought that there was now no need of his proffered help. At the behest of the complainant, the criminal charge had been withdrawn.
– 9 –
Who would Think, dear Diary, that Holy Writ could get a little Girl into so Much Trouble?
(DINTY’S DIARY)
It was Horace Amlie’s habit to supplement his reading, Scriptural and profane, by scribbling notes of passages which he deemed specially applicable to himself. Dinty came upon one of these bits of paper which fluttered to the floor under the vigor of her dusting, and read it, first to herself, then aloud to her companion.
“ ‘Wisely has St. Paul said, “It is better to marry than to burn.” He is the most human of all the Saints.’ ”
“What does it mean?” asked Wealthia languidly.
Dinty’s brow furrowed. “Something,” she answered. “I don’t know just what. I could ask Doc.” In conversation with her trusted friend she derived a reckless thrill from the use of a term which she would never have ventured to use to the gentleman’s face.
“Maybe it’s private,” suggested Wealthia.
“Scripture’s never private,” said Dinty. “I’ll take it for my text on Sunday.”
“Without knowing what it means?”
“If I sit down and think hard about it,” responded Dinty with that sunny confidence in herself which was seldom lacking from her approach to a subject, “I’ll be sure to find out. If I don’t, Miss Agatha will tell us.”
At Miss Levering’s Sunday afternoon Bible Class for the Young, each pupil was expected to present a text and offer a brief commentary thereon. Usually the selection was performed by the parents who also supplied the interpretation. Not for Dinty. She preferred to rely upon her own erudition, which was considerable, as she constantly explored recondite portions of the Scriptures, stimulated thereto more by curiosity than piety.
Several members of the class had droned out their short and innocuous offerings, when Dinty took the floor.
“My text,” she announced, “is, ‘It is better to marry than to burn.’ ”
Miss Agatha gave a maidenly start. “Do you think you understand the subject, Araminta?” she asked apprehensively.
“Oh, yes, Miss Agatha! I’ve thought it all out.”
“Then you may proceed.”
“There was a young man,” began Dinty, “and he got a young lady into trouble.”
“Araminta!” cried the teacher faintly.
“What kind of trouble?” put in Freegrace Fairlie, who had a thirst for information.
“Just trouble,” answered Dinty. “I don’t know what kind.” Miss Agatha breathed a sigh of relief. “I heard my mother talking about a girl that got into trouble once, but she snapped my ear when I asked her how. It’s got something to do with getting married, though.” She resumed her exposition. “So the young lady’s brothers came to the young man and said, ‘You’ve got to marry our sister or we’ll burn you at the stake.’ ”
“Was he a witch?” asked Happalonia Vallance. “I thought they only burned witches at the stake. Were there men-witches? I thought only women could be witches.”
“There is no instance in Holy Writ of a man being a witch,” said Miss Levering. “I think, Araminta, that we have heard …”
“Anyway,” broke in Dinty, quick to forestall a quietus on her further discourse, “he didn’t want to marry her at all. So the young men arose and wound him up and carried him out, and when he saw the fire, he cried in a loud voice, ‘Leave me loose! It is better to marry than to burn.’ And so they were married and lived happily ever after, and the last state of that man was worse than the first.”
“Araminta,” said her teacher, “do your parents know about your text?”
“No, Miss Agatha. I got it from Dr. Amlie.”
The effect shocked her. Miss Agatha turned so fiery a red that even the dovelike gray of her eyes caught a spark of it.
“Dr. Amlie?” she repeated in a failing voice.
“Yes, ma’am. Well, St. Paul, too, Dr. Amlie wrote it out and it fell on the floor. I thought it must be all right if it was from the Bible. Isn’t it?”
“You are a wicked little minx,” cried Miss Agatha, and adjourned the class.
Worse was to come. Dinty went to Dr. Amlie for enlightenment and comfort. She got neither.
“You told Miss Levering that I wrote that text?” he demanded, turning almost as scarlet as had the young lady.
“You and St. Paul,” faltered Dinty.
“Go home!”
“Yes, sir,” gulped Dinty, trying to restrain herself short of the weakness of tears. “I’m sorry. I’ll go. But, please, Dr. Amlie, won’t you tell me just one thing about what you—St. Paul, I mean, meant?”
“No!” he thundered and she staggered out, stricken.
Dinty’s revelations forced upon the maiden mind of Miss Agatha Levering matters from which she had always withheld her thoughts. After the Bible Class session, though she retired to her bedchamber to blush unseen and there took refuge in cold compresses and delicate whiffs of Millefleurs and Florida water, she could not rid her brain of its perturbations. The conviction that Horace Amlie was burning for her would not be exorcised. What the nature of that flame was, she shrank from conjecturing. Surely no modest virgin could be expected to understand, much less respond to it. “Better to marry than to burn.” Is tha
t what men married for! The very idea that she had inspired such an emotion horrified and flattered her.
Yet the maiden was mistaken in her assumption. The immediate inspiration of the Amlie-St. Paul collaboration lay not in her charms (although she had her part in it) but in those of another. The sprightly Miss Sylvia Sartie of the Archbold-and-Clarendon thespians had written him again to say that, owing to financial complications common to the profession, the return engagement in Palmyra was postponed, but that the troupe would surely be there in late October. She was, so the wrote,
… looking foreward Eegerly to seeing you and Renewing our Friendship. You were so Kind to me that I am boldened to say that I mite be kinder to you. And I remane
Your obed’t servant
Miss Sylvia Sartie of the Lyceum Company.
Certainly Dinty’s Bible Class exercise had painfully complicated the budding relationship between the two marriageable young persons. Consciousness of an awkward situation abashed Horace. As for Agatha, when next they met, at a Wednesday afternoon church sociable, she regarded him with a furtive and timorous surmise, such as might have been bestowed upon a domestic animal suddenly run rampant with alarming symptoms. Their conversation was formal, guarded and neutral.
Among those present was Dinty Jerrold, who observed it all with perturbation. Would Dr. Amlie ever forgive her?
Always for the direct and human approach, she gathered from the tamarack bog a great nosegay of the lovely white polly-whog blooms, which she interspersed with stalks of the pure-blue chicory (her Pa said her eyes were exactly that color) and carried it to Dr. Amlie’s office in his absence, lifting the window to admit it. What she saw within shocked her soul. Everything was in musty disorder. A little shower of dust, dislodged from the sill, spattered the slip of paper on which she had written in a disguised (but not too much so) hand,
“With Love and Duty from
A Well-wisher.”
Three hours later, dressed in her primmest, even to gray net gloves borrowed from her mother, she walked around to Canandaigua Road toward the close of office hours when she was sure that nobody would be there. Probably nobody would be there at any time, she thought pityingly.
Dr. Amlie was seated at his desk, reading. He lifted his head. His regard was uncompromisingly hostile.
“Consultation, three to four P.M.,” said Dinty in a small resolute voice.
“Consultation?”
“My heart hurts.”
“Nonsense!”
“It does, so. And I have spots before my eyes.”
“Indeed?”
“My pulse is funny, too.”
“Anything else?”
“My blood is sluggish, and my lungs act queer, and my skin is febrile,” said Dinty in a rush, her memory doing very well by her in the matter of earlier surreptitious medical research among the Amlie volumes. “And—and—and it’s all your fault,” she ended on a catch of the breath, abandoning literature for life. “You’re mean to me.”
“Stand here,” directed Dr. Amlie in his professional tone.
Dinty placed herself before the desk. His sinewy hands gripped her shoulders. He shook her till her teeth chattered and her eyes popped, then picked her up and set her on the desk with a bump that jarred her to her toes.
“There!” said he. “That will teach you, young lady.” He kissed her soundly. Dinty beamed.
“I knew when you got mad at me, you’d get glad again,” she said sweetly. “If you hadn’t, I’d have died.”
“Just the same, you’re a meddlesome imp and a limb of Satan.”
“I don’t care. Now may I clean up?”
“Yes.”
“And have you missed me?”
“I have so,” he admitted.
Dinty, sweeping dustily, borrowed a phrase from the Rev. Mr. Strang. “I trust that the Lord has been prospering you in your chosen calling.”
“Not specially,” answered Horace with a grimace.
“I think folks are mean!” scolded Dinty. “If they weren’t so dumb they’d know how wonderful and wise you are and nobody’d ever go to any other doctor.”
“I don’t know how they’re going to find out,” said Horace glumly.
The light of a great thought gleamed in his little friend’s eyes. “I do,” she murmured. Unfortunately he paid no heed at the time.
Though the townsfolk withheld their patronage with the conservatism which distrusts all that is young and new, outlying custom began to come in. By word-of-mouth communication, the good news had spread among the scattered clearings that the new doctor knew his trade and was not so hard a dealer as Dr. Murchison, who would often be too busy to answer a call where payment was doubtful or slow. Rough, lean, hard-bitten farmers, hunters and woodcutters appeared at the Canandaigua Road office, with ax-wounds, tree-felling bruises, and snake or wild-animal bites. Sometimes they brought their womenfolk.
Too often there were tragedies. Not until they were in desperate case would these wilderness wives abandon their household duties and spare time and money for a visit to the doctor. They came to Horace, swollen with cancer, wasted with fevers, or worn bone-thin by the cruel privations and hardships of the struggle for existence on the fringe of civilization. For, even in prosperous Western New York, the frontier was anywhere and everywhere a mile back of traveled highway or traffic-bearing stream.
Patiently the young physician sought in his well-stocked library for treatment that would aid his sick. He met with contradictions, assumptions, evasions that all but wrecked his faith in science. Remedies which had wrought miracles in the text failed utterly in his hands. Yet he had conscientiously followed the directions of the most eminent authorities, as far as he could make them out. One line of practice was easy to adopt, the depletion method which had come down the ages as an all but universal gospel. He had bled, he had cupped, he had purged, he had squilled. In spite of all, his fever-shriveled patients from the wilds went home to die. Probably they would have died anyway. But where, then, were the boasted wonders of medical science?
Heresy and rebellion ran hot in his veins. For a fip he would have thrown those learned and lying volumes out the window.
In one department, at least, he could give full value of his services. Childbirth was no guesswork, and he was a competent obstetrician. Demand for such skill was limited in town since the upper-class ladies deemed it more modest to employ a midwife, while the poor relied upon home obstetrics and the good offices of the neighbors. In the outlying districts, however, Horace began to build up a far-flung practice when it became known that no journey was too arduous for the new Doc to undertake in case of need. For some of these calls he was paid as high as two dollars, though seldom in cash.
After an all-night vigil, terminating in twins, at a young trapper’s shack near the headwaters of Red Creek, the physician returned to town with his fee tethered in the box of the wagon—three yearling shoats who, as the equipage entered town, lifted their voices in the Exile’s Lament for Home. To young Dr. Amlie’s painted self-consciousness, it seemed that the entire populace was out on Main Street that morning.
Queer wagonloads were too common for notice, but the spectacle of the dignified young physician in his beaver hat and skirted coat acting as jehu to a trio of vociferous porkers aroused the primitive sense of humor among the inhabitants. Small boys ran, whooping, alongside the equipage. Groups formed on corners to goggle and giggle. O. Daggett thrust his head out of the window, with jaw dropped and eyes staring. Genter Latham accorded the outfit a grim smile. Carlisle Sneed supported his reputation for mordant wit by shouting,
“Takin’ your patients home with you, Doc?”
T. Lay (“Buys Anything”) bawled, “Give you six shillin’ for the lot.”
Other humorous-minded citizens raised the bid. Stimulated by the clamor, the nostalgic pigs lamented their rapine in lugubrious chorus, with a popular response of grunts, snorts, squeals and hog-calls of “Peeg!—Peeg-peeg-peeg!” Yes, Palmyra was thorough
ly enjoying itself.
So was not Dr. Horace Amlie, close-lipped and hot-eyed in his seat.
Nor was Miss Agatha Levering, who emerged from the Cheap Store with a tasty pipsissiway lozenge under her tongue, and straightway lost all zest for it. Averting her face from the shameful sight, she hastily withdrew.
A solemn-eyed little damsel appeared at Horace’s office on the following morning.
“It was awful,” she began. “I could have cried.”
Horace agreed that it was awful.
“You mustn’t let it ever happen again.”
Horace had no wish that it should ever happen again, and said so explicitly.
“It won’t do any good to swear,” said Dinty. “You must have a gig.”
“A what?”
“A nice doctor’s gig. Like Old Murch’s.”
“Gigs,” Horace pointed out, “cost money.”
“Thirty-five dollars,” said Dinty.
“I haven’t got thirty-five dollars to spare.”
“Mr. Latham would let you have it, I’m sure,” said she. “Pa always hires money of Mr. Latham when he’s short.”
“I’ve never been in debt and I never mean to be,” asserted Horace. “Besides, I’ve got a little money put by with my uncle in Utica,” he admitted waveringly.
Dinty’s eyes sparkled. “How much?”
“A hundred dollars. Maybe a little more.”
“How much more? Fifty more?”
“No. And besides …”
“Twenty more?”
“Yes. About.”
“A hundred-and-twenty,” she cried triumphantly. “Send for it.”
“All of it? What for?”
“To get you up, fine and pompous, the way we want you to look. Wealthy and I, we’ve got it all planned out for you.”
“Oh, you have, have you! Well, let me tell you, young lady …”
“No, please, Doc—I mean Doctor. Wait till you see Wealthy. She’s out getting prices and samples from the shops.”
Though Dinty was the guiding spirit of the pair in all other enterprises, in social matters Wealthia took undisputed lead. She arrived presently, her great, dark eyes lustrous with anticipation, her dainty hands clutching samples and bits of paper.
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